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Roman Empire per capita GDP shows the Romans were poorer than any 2015 country
- Isamu 9y ago> The numbers for the map come from historian Angus Maddison who uses Sestertius records to find wheat equivalent figure for national disposable income and makes comparisons based off that. Links to several of Angus Maddison books, I assume it is this: Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History
- baybal2 9y agoInteresting, their methodology is kinda khmm thought. When historians were going over the archives of the medieval Khivan Khanate, they found out from tax records that ~12% of all households in Khiva and Bukhara had over 10kgs of gold. Yet, if you were to apply the same methodology there, you will get same contradicting results
- EthanHeilman 9y ago>Yet, if you were to apply the same methodology there, you will get same contradicting results Can you explain this point further? Are you saying that Khanate tax records are inaccurate or that the Khivan Khanate were more wealthy than people today?
- baybal2 9y agoYes, people were saying for long that if Khiva was still a country today, it would be joining ranks of places like Andorra, or Luxembourg. Yet, people had to spend a big part of their income on simply food, water, clothing, and fuel
- notahacker 9y agoYou'd expect the top 10% of households' accumulated wealth over many generations to be a few decades of average annual income, especially if they're large households. US GDP per capita is around $50k and households in the top income decile all have household wealth in excess of a million dollars 10kgs of gold is about $40k, so is entirely consistent with Khivan GDP per capita being in the $500-$2000 range
- baybal2 9y ago>10kgs of gold is about $40k, so is entirely consistent with Khivan GDP per capita being in the $1k-$2k range 10kg of gold worth around $0.5m USD today. You are off by 10 times
- notahacker 9y agohaha, you're right (tbf I was only wrong by half an order of magnitude if I switch to 1800 gold prices!) It'd be interesting to see how the figures compare when taking into account how long the gold took to accumulate and the size of the household whose wealth it represented, and the wealth of the wider region. But more basic goods that enhance standards of living are probably a better representation of a civilization's wealth than the notional modern value of their gold hoards, especially if the gold was being hoarded precisely because the Silk Road couldn't supply them with things even today's poor can acquire
- lmm 9y agoGold is a relatively fixed supply, so the per-capita price of gold grows as population rises. It's not a good proxy for costs of living/happiness; if you want to measure household savings a better unit would be something like "how many calories of the cheapest available food could they buy?"
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoLooking at that map, helps to understand why the Eastern Roman Empire was in much better shape than the Western Roman Empire.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoRoman Empire per capita GDP shows the Romans were poorer than any 2015 country Take away iPhones, cable bills, insurance, college, cars....and you may do just fine (eat 1-2 times a day :)) with their Capita GDP.
- rpedela 9y agoAt that GDP, also take away vaccines, antibiotics, refrigeration, sanitation...and you are living like them with high mortality. Almost every person living in a modern country is living better than all the kings, nobles, emperors, etc in all of history. There are still plenty of poor people who we should help, but "poor" is relative historically.
- jszymborski 9y agoJust because vaccines, antibiotics, and refrigeration exist, it doesn't mean there is universal access to them. I think the references to "almost every person" and "modern country" are sweeping away a lot more people than you let on.
- rpedela 9y agoHere are some stats on vaccines in the US [1]. You can do your own research on the rest, but I think you'll find the numbers to be extremely high. Even homeless people, who I am not counting, in the US have some access to those things. My wife, a clinical pharmacist, is always giving antibiotics to the homeless who come to the ER for free. I know the US the best, but I would be surprised if other modern countries weren't similar in terms of basic healthcare, sanitation, etc. We can of course argue what "modern country" means. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/immunize.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/immunize.htm
- rsynnott 9y agoCertain vaccines are almost universal; in particular, that's how smallpox was eliminated.
- WalterBright 9y ago
- epicureanideal 9y agoThe people at the time were able to feed themselves, clothe themselves, and so on. I have a hard time thinking of this as a less than $1000 equivalent existence, but maybe it is... This also reminds me that GDP isn't a measure of overall wellbeing, and the article doesn't claim it is. I'd be interested to see a map of relative wellbeing. I don't think people then were 1/100th as happy as us on average.
- Synaesthesia 9y agoPeople did not work for salaries generally, that is a relatively modern phenomenon, David Graeber talks about it in Debt: The first 5000 years.
- mac01021 9y ago> I don't think people then were 1/100th as happy as us on average. Your user name is oddly appropriate for that topic. In ancient Greece, the Epicureans (a form of Hedonist) supposed that people's pleasure and pain depend on the satiation (or lack thereof) of their appetites. Related is the idea of "Hedonic Adaptation" which has it that people's appetites tend to adapt to conform to their expectations and that, as a consequence, different people in wildly different circumstances tend to be about equally happy. Perhaps you knew all of that already. But you seem to be rejecting the idea of the Hedonic Treadmill without properly mentioning it.
- sandworm101 9y ago>> I don't think people then were 1/100th as happy as us on average. I'm not so sure. Actual starvation, death due to lack of food, is extremely rare in the modern world. Far less than 0.1% of the human population actually starves to death today. But in Roman times it was not uncommon. It was a relatively normal occurrence for a region to starve should the weather not play ball. Add in all the various diseases and I'm open to the idea that the average Roman was far less happy than the average person today.
- majormajor 9y agoDoes anyone have historical data on suicide rates? Seems like a decent proxy (EDIT: proxy for happiness, not for base needs) to check.
- anigbrowl 9y agoThe map is interesting but the economic analysis is really poor. Trying to use purchasing power parity to compare a feudal society with an industrial capitalist one is misguided, given the vast differences in property rights, the existence of slavery as a fundamental (and complex) economic institution, and so on.
- CharlesDodgson 9y agoI agree, to talk only about GDP is misguided and narrow, I think the power dynamics of the time were far different and it's a case of apples and oranges.
- balance_factor 9y agoDifferent things can be shown by different measurements. Income disparity in Brazil is high, so you have a few people like Jorge Paulo Lemann worth tens of billions of dollars, and then a lot of poor people. So per capita GDP there is more an indication of how he is doing than everyone else (GDP divided by population). One metric we can use is hours worked per week. Obviously, the less hours of required work needed, the better for the average worker. Of course measurements like this are not the focus of many blog posts. And you yourself are probably deficient in this respect to many hunter-gatherer bands, who do less than 40 hours of work per week. They spend the rest of their time in leisure activities. Marshall Sahlins "Stone Age Economics" goes into this. You yourself are probably required to work more hours per week than native people in Polynesia and other areas.
- Retric 9y agoBrazil has 207.7 million people. One guy making even 5 billion $ per year is only 25$ per person worth of GDP.
- pyromine 9y agoEither way, mean (as in per capita GDP) is probably not the best measure of central tendency for showing how the typical person lives.
- Retric 9y agoGDP is less about what the average person has than it is the capabilities of a given society. Liechtenstein may have a very high standard of living, but it can't exactly fund a space program with a ~6 billion dollar GDP. Also, median also has issues dealing with things like the US's vast undocumented workforce. So, you really want to slice things up by income percentile, family type, PPP and non etc.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoMedian is a mathematical concept that doesn't know or care about a person's immigration status. The dataset plugged in and the mathematical operation performed on it are two distinct concepts and shouldn't be confused. It's the same reason the IRS lets undocumented citizens and documented citizens performing unsavory work (including drug dealing and prostitution) to file taxes :)
- fallingfrog 9y agoGDP only measures taxable activity (goods bought and sold), which was a far smaller part of a person's day to day activity back then. Also, these are 1990 dollars, which are worth about twice as much as 2017 dollars.
- jxramos 9y agoWhen you visit the Tower of London and enter the bedroom chambers of the King and check out the modest bed and other things the tour guide pokes some fun at how most modern people today live better than kings of the past.
- PhilWright 9y agoOn the other hand they had lots of labor. A butler comes in to wake them and then a valet to help them dress. Then they decide to take a morning walk in the garden, so a page runs outside and tells the gardeners to make themselves scarce so they can walk without seeing the staff. They ask to take a trip down the river Thames and so a whole staff moves into operation to get the royal barge ready. It all looks effortless to the King because a large household makes it so.
- gadders 9y agoHenry VIIIth didn't even have to wipe his own backside. He had the Groom of the Stool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groom_of_the_Stool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groom_of_the_Stool
- HarryHirsch 9y agoOn the other hand, consider the Arnolfini marriage portrait (that's this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Eyck_-_Arnolfini_Portrait.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Eyck_-_Arnolfini_Port...), and you recognize that clothes like the couple are wearing in the painting are affordable only to 1-percenters. Then and now.
- zeveb 9y ago> you recognize that clothes like the couple are wearing in the painting are affordable only to 1-percenters. Then and now. I'm pretty sure that someone in the SCA has made one of those outfits. In fact: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/1b/9a/4b/1b9a4b90019bef529ca2e4cd0fca46ea.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/564x/1b/9a/4b/1b9a4b90019bef529ca2e4cd0...
- pipio21 9y agoIt is just not that: you need to display Mesopotamia and China and the Indus valley. Those were the fertile and rich places in the world along with Egypt. Those places are now devastated by war, revolutions or overpopulation, or just were invaded by other empires. It is a reminder of the powerful forces of change.
- jaclaz 9y ago>While the Romans were able to build engineering marvels such as roads and aqueducts, they wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a mobile phone. But - to be fair - they wouldn't have needed to buy a new smartphone every two years or so, nor to pay subscription to any mobile carrier. With all due respect for the map (and the accuracy of the calculations by the econo-historian) that may be very valid, the comparison with modern times (i.e. the linked to article) makes (at least to me) very little sense. GDP/PPP based calculations on poverty line already (even in modern times comparisons between different countries) suffer from "skewing" because of the different needs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity#Global_poverty_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity#Global... let alone comparing today with 2000 years ago.
- wmeredith 9y agoTo be fair, I wouldn't have a clue what to do with an aqueduct.
- ancientworldnow 9y agoAqueducts are still extremely important parts of a modern water system. NYC, for example, gets most of its water from aqueducts.
- jaclaz 9y ago>To be fair, I wouldn't have a clue what to do with an aqueduct. I would guess that once you will have a city and a decent number of citizens in it you will quickly find out a possible use for it.
- isostatic 9y agoBuild a city larger than 8
- nerpderp83 9y agoDNR. Technology needs to be put in context. I saw people in Nepal with mobile phones that didn't have access to clean water. Rather than GDP I'd measure the likelihood to die of disease, famine, war, etc. Technology is a tool. The same cognitive dissonance is seen when discussing evolution.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dghughes 9y agoOff-topic but modern Spain being in the news I found it interesting how modern Spain is shown on the map in 14 AD. There is a sharp divide between Spain and what is now France I imagined Catalonia and Occitania would have been one province.
- astine 9y agoWhy would Catalonia and Occitania be one province? The Pyrenees mountains make for a pretty strong natural border. Catalonia doesn't trace back to ancient Rome but the middle ages. It's one of the medieval Christian kingdoms that fought with the various Islamic regimes that ruled southern Spain until it was subsumed into Aragon (which was later merged with Castile.) Prior to that they were all part of a unified Visigothic empire.
- flukus 9y agoWith the exception of Roussilon and a few other bits of southern France that were once part of Catalonia/Aragon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Spain#/media/File:506-Castile_1210.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Spain#/media/File:5...). Before that some of the area was part of the Umayyad Caliphate at their peak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Spain#/media/File:Map_Iberian_Peninsula_750-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Spain#/media/File:M...). Before that is was part of Visigothic Hispania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Spain#/media/File:Hispania_700_AD.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Spain#/media/File:H...). Also, unlike much of Spain, Catalonia was never under Carthaginian control. So for much of history Catalonia and parts of Occitania were tied together to varying degrees.
- boomboomsubban 9y agoThe Pyrenees mountains have been a natural border splitting the two regions basically forever. Also, Occitania is doing slightly better than most of Spain, likely due to the proximity and earlier acquisition. As for the rest of France, Caesar conquered Gaul sixty years earlier, slaughtering up to a million Gallic people. That's the kind of thing that can set your economy way back.
- ghaff 9y agoThe author of Why the West Rules--For Now has published a separate PDF that goes into the social development index that he developed for the book. [1] Essentially, development level went way down after the Roman Empire but the industrial revolution made all the development before pale by comparison. This is just another attempt to frame a very complex topic but it does take a lot of factors into account. [1] http://ianmorris.org/docs/social-development.pdf http://ianmorris.org/docs/social-development.pdf
- CalChris 9y agoIs that a GDP problem or did they have an income distribution problem? I'm going to hazard a guess that since slavery was the backbone of the Roman Empire, they had an income distribution problem.
- rsynnott 9y agoEven beyond that, they had a huge income distribution problem, with most of the land (and therefore most of the income; it was primarily an agrarian economy) belonging to very few people. Of course, this wasn't unique to the Roman Empire; it was an almost universal state of affairs until at least the industrial revolution.
- ramblenode 9y agoI'm not an economist or a historian but I wonder if there is an aspect to Roman wealth here that isn't captured well by GDP. As an example, Roman roads are famous for their durability, whereas modern highways (which experience very different traffic) need to be repaved on the order of years or decades. For the same distance of road, it would seem a great deal more economic activity in the form of labor, construction, and materials is needed to sustain a modern roadway. If key Roman infrastructure investments simply had a longer lifetime than modern infrastructure (because of design, requirements, etc.), wouldn't that imply the per capita wealth of the empire could be high without a particularly high GDP? Curious if there is any literature about this.
- chromaton 9y agoWe only remember the stuff that actually lasted.
- sliverstorm 9y agoIt sounds like you're basically arguing for the use of NDP, net domestic product. Wear on roads et cetera is the cost of the added (design, requirements, etc) of that higher GDP, and NDP would be the net benefit.
- njarboe 9y agoGDP is not good measure of wealth, happiness, or greatness of a country. It is useful for the government to increase it when the government taxes income and sales. If everything was made to last forever and we had already produced everything we needed, GDP could be almost zero (food production in US about 2% of GDP?) and the people could be doing great.
- hjnilsson 9y agoA very important aspect to consider here is that a roman road did not have 100 000+ multi-ton vehicles traveling on them per day. The reason roman roads lasted long is that the load on a road with only manual labor traffic is a thousand times less than that of a modern highway. Old roads in Europe that are subject to truck and car traffic crumble very quickly unless meticulously maintained.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Spooky23 9y agoThe better question is how did GDP for a Roman citizen compare to a contemporary barbarian or slave? The productivity difference between a modern worker is multiple orders of magnitude more than an ancient one. GDP comparisons are of questionable value.
- anesmike 9y agoEnergy is the master resource and rome did not have oil; its that simple.
- criley2 9y agoCrude oil was irrelevant 2000 years ago. The primary forms of energy were wood, dung, and charcoal if I'm not mistaken. There wasn't really energy infrastructure like there is today, outside of firewood/charcoal supply, which the Romans had in great supply. But the average roman did not require much energy outside of cooking, as the temperate Mediterranean weather did not require heating energy. The modern concept of energy running the world is really an Industrial/post-Industrial concept. Coal, then oil energy driving mass industry is the driver of modern power. Energy -> +Industry -> +Economic activity -> +Money -> +Power
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoEven if found, there was not much use for foul smelling oil. Myrrh, on the other hand, was valuable, and so was olive oil which could be used for lamps.
- chewz 9y agoYou are mistaken. Romans had been on industrial scale mining copper, gold and silver in Spain and other places. That required unbelievable amounts of energy - mostly charcoal. Romand knew waterwheel as a source of energy but rarely used - compared to medieval Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy#Output https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy#Output
- ppeetteerr 9y agoThis is common to all periods of the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P... Today, we take for granted that the production of each individual is greatly improved by machinery. We own multiple items of clothing, eat a varied diet, and live in homes of concrete heated and cooled by electricity. And this description applies to upcoming economies like Ukraine. If you take the example of what a feudal Russian lived in the 1700, many built their own homes out of wood using an axe and wood from the forest, they would buy fabric and furs but had to make and mend their own clothes, they would hunt and work the land of their lord for sustinence. Their diet was restricted to seasons and death by famine and disease was rampant. The few coins they could accumulate went towards the purchase of must haves (metal tools, basic textiles, a furnace, and luxuries like animals). In winter, they would sleep on top of their furnace for heat, and their home was filled with smoke. Urban centres were no different. The 1000sqft apartments we have today are 5-10x the size of dwellings in London or Paris during the same period. You can see this visiting the ruins of Rome too. Life was tough but we forget how tough it was because most of us idealize the simpler times of the past.
- tome 9y agoPeople lived in 100sqft apartments?
- vmarsy 9y agoPeople today still? In Paris, Chambre de bonnes "must have a minimum surface area of 9 m2"[1]. That's 96.87 sqft. "The rooms usually have a surface area of around 6–12 m2" (65 to 129 sqft) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chambre_de_bonne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chambre_de_bonne
- tome 9y agoWell OK, but that goes somewhat against my parent comment who was trying to show that things were worse then!
- littlestymaar 9y agoBreaking news : pre-industrial civilisation had less material wealth than ours.
- emmelaich 9y agoYou could be less snarky but yeah. Shorter history: For a long time people had short brutal lives. Then the industrial revolution happened.
- boomboomsubban 9y agoIn 14 AD, while Rome was still recovering from nearly a century of civil war. Huge chunks of that land had been bloodily acquired in the past sixty years, and an unrecorded numbers of Romans died during the fall of the Republic.
- chewz 9y agoWith the respect for authors this might be at best rough estimation with large error margin. We know little about economic relations, purchasing power, prices etc. in Roman Empire. Also I wonder how these numbers would look like if slave population is excluded.
- alexasmyths 9y agoYou can't do PPP across cultures that have no bearing one another, so it's utterly ridiculous to do a 'GDP' measure. How much did the Romans value 'clean air'? Because they don't breathe fumes, whereas we do. 'Comparative Value' makes it impossible. We can only say: "this is what the average Romand had and did - and this is what the average American/European/Asian has" etc..
- snrplfth 9y agoHaha. They breathed tons of fumes, most of their households' cooking and heating was fueled with either wood, charcoal or dung, in open or not-well-sealed hearths. (Woodsmoke is still the world's deadliest source of pollution.) Roman cities especially were ferociously polluted.
- alexasmyths 9y agoIf there is a stove-pipe then they are not breathing any fumes.
- snrplfth 9y agoA lot of stovepipes leak fumes, an in any case most people in the Roman empire had no such thing as a stovepipe. It's absolutely a myth that most premodern people had "clean air". No, it was generally filled with smoke, dung dust, mold spores, etc.
- jitix 9y agoI think the Roman gdp from that period should be compared with the gdps of other countries of that time. Sure the average ancient Roman might have been poorer than the average modern Congolese but I think humans in general were poor during that time.
- indubitable 9y agoI do not understand why people consider GDP a meaningful indicator of wealth. The United States is a great example of a very real issue with it. Our GDP/capita has been skyrocketing. Since just 2000 it has increased by about 17%. However, since 2000 the real median income has increased by less than 1%. It seems like our country, and many others, are optimizing for GDP growth. I assume at some point in the past, it presumably did correlate to wealth, so this made sense. But I think our attempt (and success) at maximizing GDP has shown that such a correlation was indeed just a correlation, and not a causal relationship. Nonetheless, we continue to focus on GDP, and this is simply bemusing. And now to compare GDP optimized modern nations, to an out of left field ballpark estimate for an ancient empire? I think that's clearly not a very reasonable thing to do.
- fsloth 9y ago"I do not understand why people consider GDP a meaningful indicator of wealth" So what would you measure instead? At least empirically GDP gives a good ballpark estimate of the general level of development in a country. Not that itself alone makes sense, but in a global world it's a pretty good indicator at where a country is economically. GDP of a pre-modern empire is far more debatable, of course. But, the life of a roman peasant was not that much different from that of a rural worker in, say, india. Except, no cell phones, not even the slightest chance for vaccination, the cultivated species were probably less productive, etc.
- indubitable 9y agoI would focus on something much easier - what was life, approximately, like for somebody in the exact 50th percentile of socioeconomic status. It even makes more sense today. How has life changed for somebody in the 50th percentile in 2000 versus today? How has it changed for somebody in the 50th percentile in 1970 vs today? This focus on the lifestyle approximation also makes much more sense than even factors like inflation. For instance inflation today is ostensibly very low, with the Fed becoming increasingly aggressive with monetary policy to try to sustain it (deflation is not fun). Nonetheless, that doesn't really mesh well with the 50% who have seen many of the necessities of life (housing, education, healthcare, etc) inflate at rates vastly greater than the reported inflation rate. Quantification makes things seem much more scientific, but the key word there is seem. Without a strong 1:1 mapping of a quantification to what it implicitly represents, it becomes less than useless -- it becomes actively misleading. So for instance I think based on what I said above you might suggest I'm just referring to median personal income. Of course in nations where e.g. women do not work, median personal income would be incredibly misleading. So perhaps I am talking about median household income. Yet in countries where large numbers of poor individuals reside within a single household, again the value becomes meaningless. I do not think there is any singular consistent and clear way to compare wealth over time and circumstance, other than to compare an average approximation of a lifestyle. I think this thread is a good example of this. Many have mentioned that by many metrics today, the average person today is wealthier than a medieval king. Yet how many people would rather be an average individual today than a king of a medieval era? If people like the things that these metrics represent, the answer to that question should cohere with their measured increase today. In other words most people should prefer to be an average person today. I strongly suspect that is not the case.
- campuscodi 9y agoOf course they were. They worse sandals and rode on horses. All countries in the past, regardless of size, are poorer even in comparison to the poorest countries today
- beloch 9y agoIn ancient Rome, the gap between the rich and the poor was even more obscene that it is now. Despite having such a low GDP, Rome's wealthiest private citizens were as rich, or richer, than the richest of today. For example, Marcus Licinius Crassus' net worth was estimated to be up to double that of Bill Gates. Was Crassus an ancient Bill Gates though? Not so much. Rome's wealthiest mostly obtained their fortunes from conquest. Crassus, on the other hand, made his fortune by taking advantage of his peers. For example, during Sulla's dictatorship, Crassus would buy the estates of other citizens after they fell victim to Sulla's proscriptions for pennies on the dollar. He even snuck the names of wealthy individuals onto the proscription lists just so he could plunder their estates! Crassus also, famously, ran a fire brigade that would show up to fires and then refuse to put them out until the owner of the burning property sold out to Crassus for cheap. For a society of mafia warrior lawyers, the Romans sure let each other get away with murder.
- jules 9y agoHow do you compare the wealth of Crassus us with Bill Gates?
- titzer 9y agoE.g. proportional share of wealth.
- briga 9y agoCan we really compare wealth between people who lived 2000 years apart though? The amount of material goods a relatively poor middle class American can afford is vastly greater than what the richest Romans could buy 2000 years ago. How do you compare net worth?
- barrkel 9y agoSome things haven't changed: land, control over people. Another way to measure wealth in a comparable way is the proportion of the economic production someone is able to control.
- WillReplyfFood 9y agoRomans and Greeks where also Post-Wood- meaning, they had deforrested most of the mediterainian for ship wood. Macchia
- PeterStuer 9y agoFood for thought: Put 20 people in a circle, each growing, cooking and eating their own meal. GDP=0 Put those same 20 people in the same circle, each growing, cooking but instead of eating their own 'buying' the meal from the person to the left for a fixed price. GDP>0 GDP isn't what it's made out to be.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoEvery measure we can come up with will have absurd corner cases and failure modes. The question is, if and how often those corner cases happen in the real world.
- lmm 9y agoThat's a known issue with a relatively small impact on GDP, and there are ways to fix it (imputed labour costs). All models are wrong, but some are useful; GDP is pretty good as far as it goes.
- soVeryTired 9y agoGDP might be useful for comparing what happened this year to what happened last year, but It's hard to see it making sense for comparison between times or places that are significantly different. For one example of how the comparison breaks down, consider the cost of adding up a page full of numbers in 1950 vs. today. In 1950, you'd need to hire an accounting clerk. Nowadays it's essentially free. In 1950, the clerk would have added the value of his labour to GDP, Today, the computer doing the same job contributes little or nothing. The same problem crops up everywhere. If I develop a $1000/month treatement for hepatitis, I might add a vast amount to GDP. If I develop a $5 one-off cure, not so much. GDP can't 'see' goods and services that are so cheap to produce that they're practically free.
- readittwice 9y agoDid you read the full article? They have an paragraph on that under the section Methodology. IMHO this addresses your concern. What's your problem with that reasoning?
- soVeryTired 9y agoThe only thing I can find is this: >The numbers for the map come from historian Angus Maddison who uses Sestertius records to find wheat equivalent figure for national disposable income and makes comparisons based off that. But all that says is that some guy used historical records for Roman income figures. It doesn't tell you anything about how to relate income in Roman times to income today.
- unlmtd1 9y agoWe are counting capital base erosion as 'growth'. We are poorer than at any time in history. Our rivers are undrinkable and our forests burnt. Our fauna is being decimated and our mineral riches is disappearing in smoke. Well done.
- gadders 9y ago"If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus" I believe Edward Gibbon said that "modern" life only overtook that period during the early 19th century.
- peter303 9y ago“Behind every modern man are 200 energy slaves”, a calculation attributed to Buckminster Fuller and others. You calculate the per capita energy usage divided by a humans daily caloric intake (on human labor eqivalent) to estimate an energy slave count. 3/4ths of the energy comes from fossil fuels which has been storing solar energy for hundreds of thousands of years. Technologynthat harnesses energy creates much of modern GDP. I doubt we will ever sink back to the lows where as much as 2/3rds the population is slave labor to a ruling class (Rome, Vikings, US South). When fossil fuels become too expensive, we’ll have figured out how to have gotten more efficiency out ofbthe remaing 50 renewable energy slaves.